The SWE Hartford (Connecticut) Professional Section hosted a weekly virtual Makerspace Workshop over a 6-week period during Spring 2021. The event fostered engineering design competence through hands-on technical training and the development of mastery of growth mindset skills. The workshop strongly emphasized SWE’s strategic goals of advocacy, diversity and inclusion by involving students from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and races. Participants were high school students interested in an engineering degree, including students with hearing impairments (supported by American Science Language (ASL) interpreters), as well as female engineering college students.
The SWE Hartford Professional Section conducted “Engineering Design: A Virtual Makerspace Workshop Series” one evening per week during the April – May 2021 timeframe. Teams of high school and undergraduate students worked collaboratively in a virtual environment to develop their technical and communications skills. Over forty students participated and completed a series of hands-on activities to accomplish three goals: encourage curiosity and interest in engineering design; introduce concepts of construction and theory of learning through building; and work in collaborative teams to use their skillset and mindset to build community, purpose, and engineering self-efficacy. Some of the activities and topics included TinkerCad and 3D printing, practicing an “elevator pitch”, car building, motors, pulleys, gears, pumps and pneumatics, tissue engineering, bioreactors and sharing successes, failures and big ideas. Six SWE members volunteered the day of the event.
Caption: SWE Hartford Professional Section’s Engineering Design: A Virtual Makerspace Workshop Series activities: Bioreactor Design (left) and Motor Pulley Cars (right).
Best practice take-aways from the SWE Hartford Engineering Design: A Virtual Makerspace Workshop Series event included:
- A virtual makerspace allows access to many more students from different locations. However, it limits the in-person relationship building and physical assistance many students need. Fifteen students with an instructor seemed optimal.
- Create a positive environment to allow reflection, casual conversation and a supportive network so that participants feel comfortable to make mistakes and take big risks. Provide time at the end of each activity for students to report and showcase their design work and have a platform to speak.
- As educators they learned some of the challenges of virtual learning for the hearing impaired students. For example, the hearing impaired students struggled to watch both the instructor’s screen and the ASL interpreter’s screen at the same time. To create a more inclusive classroom, modification in the instruction timing was needed to accommodate.
